The Journey of a Thousand Miles ...
If you are a newbie to the Bible, and especially a young person, I’m sure that what I have just pressed on your awareness has quite dismayed you. The prospect of getting familiar enough with the Bible to be able to tell when you are really listening to your own subconscious desires - or a lying spirit - certainly looks daunting from the outside.
The Bible after all, is a book of about 1,300 to 2,100 or so pages in many translations, (many of which look like pages of legal documents - especially in translations where the the text is in two columns on the page.) And it is not just one book, but sixty-six separate books, by almost as many authors, of almost as many professions, that cover a time period from the beginnings of recorded history to about 90 AD - about 2,000 years - that elasped more than 2,000 years ago.
The documents were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - foreign languages. And they have come from the Eastern mind set rather than the Western mind set. They have been translated into various languages at various times in history, with some translations being good, and others being lousy, but none of them ever keeping up with the speed with which human beings have changed their languages, idioms, figures of speech, and customs.
The books cover a variety of literary forms, from stories, to dairies, to chronicals, to poems, to lists, to essays, to maxims and proverbs, to forth-tellings and fore-tellings, to procedures, and participations, and to -- well, the end of the world (but with a sighting of the new one!)
This is all a mighty long walk on a very short pier, considering how very little free time most of us have. And this is where the problem is. We moderns percieve time differently than the ancients who wrote the books of the Bible. Just compare the time lengths on the tracks of these two CD’s of music from two different time periods:
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827), Symphony No 1 and 2:
Track 1: 9’38 Track 2: 8’43 Track 3: 4’00 Track 4: 6’22 Track 5: 10’23 Track 6: 13’26 Track 7: 4’12 Track 8: 7’09
The B-52’s, Cosmic Thing
Track 1: 3’50 Track 2: 4’54 Track 3: 4’45 Track 4: 5’21 Track 5 5’04 Track 6 4’54
Track 7 4:58 Track 8 4’49 Track 9 4’30 Track 10 4’08
What’s noticable about this is that the modern CD has but half as much time on each track in comparision to the Beethoven CD. That’s a pretty good representation of what’s different about the modern age: We spend ever less time on increasingly more things. The scandal of Rock and Roll music was never so much about sex (through there was that) as about the fact that concentration was being diluted because more things were happening faster. Rock and Roll had simply brought popular music in line with the new, rev-ed up pace of time that modern man had just created with the invention of the radio, the television, the automobile, the jet, the telephone, etc.
Mr. Beethoven’s time was probably the last time in history that time had been experienced the same way it had been experienced by the writers of the books of the Bible.
In Mr. Beethoven’s day, when there was an event like a concert, or a public lecture, or a sermon, people had to take a lot of time to walk or ride (by horses or horse drawn carts) to arrive at the venue. And they had to walk back home when it was over. So they all made a day of experiencing and consentrating on whatever it was they were going to see or hear. It was not unusual for a musical performance peice to last a good long while. Likewise, this was the great age of the three hour sermon, oration, or public lecture.
So what’s different now? Everything’s zippiddity-do-dah now, and everyone’s attention span has been halfed with each succeeding invention of a new way to experience media.
I’ve noticed for a while that people - and especially young people - are becoming unable to tolerate a speech or sermon that lasts more than fifteen minutes. Those vocalizations used to be tolerated for more than an hour. Over my life I’ve seen the tolerable time period drop to one hour, then to a half hour, and now to fiftteen minutes. Why?
Television. First there were movies on TV of more than one hour. Then came one hour long TV shows, every hour on the hour. Then the half hour television comedy came along, and people got used to time being sliced thinner and thinner. A while back ago, MTV introduced a show called “Liquid Television” in which a series of stories were run in segments of fifteen minutes. And I’m sure the break down of the average teenager’s day into a series of one hour classroom periods for different subjects has also contributed to this viscerial sense of the intolerability of anything that lasts longer than an hour.
Why am I dwelling on this? I’m dwelling on this because if you are a newbie to the Bible, that’s the first thing you’ll run up against when you start reading the Bible. In the Bible, you are going to meet a lot of ancient folk who apparently have a lot of time on their hands, and aren’t afraid to use it up copiously.
You’ll be in the middle of the book of Job, in the middle of a desert, with Job in rags, sitting on ashes, scrapping his boils with a peice of broken pottery, and with Bildad the Shunhite on one side of him and Zophar the Naamathite on the other - and Bilddad will have taken twenty-one verses to say something, followed by Job taking twenty-nine verses to say something, followed by Zophar taking twenty-nine verses to say something - and you will then go “HEY DUDES! GET TO THE POINT! I GOT SOCCER PRACTICE IN FIFTEEN MINUTES!”
The first thing you’ll run into in reading the Bible is that you cannot run. You must sit. And listen. And sometimes a Samuel Becket play will be a lot more fun.
As a young person, I did not have the blessings of concrete prayer available to me when I first started trying to climb this literary Matterhorn we call the Bible. I assure you I was not then the verse-spouting guy who has written this book that I am now.
As a young guy, my thing was science-fiction stories. Zippiddity-do-dah’s set in all the zippiddity-do-dah-est futures that could possibly be imagined. My literarary perferences were light years from "three guys sitting around in a desert, two thousand years ago, bloviating."
But, even without the golden thread-making of concrete prayer, the Lord led me through a process that got me used to the idea of epic literature. That was what was missing in my makeup, and is very missing from the make up of the modern world today. In the modern world today, we are so used to fifteen minute informercials and one minute commercials that we are very unused to a message being buried in a large, long, lumbering, multi-part story that apparently only three guys sitting around in a desert have the time of day for.
As a young man, the Lord led me to read first, Stephen Donaldson’s series of epic Thomas Covenant novels, and then later, JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Talk about having your reset button pushed! By the time I got Tolkien all the way through me, I finally realized that the Bible, though composed of sixty-six different books by somewhat as many authors, at somewhat as many different times -- was an epic about a single man, Jesus Christ. Reading about Aragorn son of Arathorn in The Lord of the Rings allowed me to see Christ in the context of the whole Bible.
Rev 19:10
10 ... for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
(KJV)
This testimony about testimony is true.
John 5:37-39
37 And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.
38 And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not.
39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
(KJV)
But why put that simple message into a big, lumbering thing like an epic? Why not just pare it all down into a Mission Statement that can be easily distributed and read by all concerned?
Well, that has actually been tried, and it didn’t go well.
For as long as there has been television coverage of football games in the United States, there has been a tradition of evangelistically minded game-goers holding up signs to the television cameras that said:
If we actually do have a Bible in our house, and we actually do look up John 3:16, we will indeed find that it is indeed a Mission Statement:
John 3:16
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
(KJV)
This is the entire Bible, pared down to a mission statement.
But what happened? Later on a professional wrestler started promoting himself as
It became apparent that in the world of sports, the “3:16” designation has been fetishized into a “mojo” of some sort. The Homer Simpson demographic never really “got” the JOHN 3:16 gambit (and unless grace intervines, probably never will.)
Mission statements are for the front door of the mind. And as such they can be easily kicked off the front door, or quickly ignored like an inconsequential item in the daily news aggregator. An epic, on the other hand, is meant for the heart, the backdoor of the mind. Once it gets in there, it is hard to throw back out or ignore.
A message carried in the form of an epic is a message that becomes worshipful. It comes from the heart and is aimed at the heart.
The Finns (the people who live in Finland) have a national epic that dates back before the modern era. It’s called The Kalevala. A section of it was made into a symphonic poem by Sibelius that is called Kullervo. Kullervo is about a young prince of Finland, named Kullervo, who seduced a beautiful maiden, who is later found to be his sister. She throws herself into a river and drowns. And he curses himself with remorse. Kullervo later goes to war and slaughters a village-full of innocent people. After this, he comes back to the place where he seduced his sister, and is again overcome with remorse. “... he askes his sword whether it will take the life of a guilty man. The sword replies by asking why it shouldn't since it has already taken the lives of the innocent. With this Kullervo impales himself on his own blade.” http://inkpot.com/classical/kullervo.html
Now, on the face of it, that does not seem like a especially edifying story. But there is more in the The Kalevala that that. A series of pre-modern Finns took both Kullero’s tragedy and some other old Finnish myths, and molded it into a fabulous song cycle that expresses the deepest things Finns feel about being Fninish. There is a section in the Sibelius’ symphony where a chant is sung by a choir of alpha-males. I think the US Army’s combat helicopter fleet might want to consider dropping “The Ride of the Valkyries” and using this chant instead. When Sibelius came out with “Kullervo,” the dormant Finnish nation suddenly came to life as it had never done so before. This is epic. From the heart to the heart.
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